International Women’s Day 2024

Today is International Women’s Day, which as I’ve written about before has a longer history than most people assume.

Whenever there’s an awareness day for a demographic group to try increase public understanding of particular issues they face, a small but loud group of voices ask why other groups aren’t being considered, which in this case typically means men. Well, actually there is an International Men’s Day focusing on issues men typically overindex against and last year I attended a great discussion in Crawley about what can be done to reduce rates of male suicide.

Why International Women’s Day gets more attention shouldn’t be hard to understand. Throughout the vast majority of history women have been treated as at best second-class citizens and all-too-often like slaves or worse. Even today, many of the most basic internationally-recognised liberal and social rights go ignored for vast numbers of women around the world.

Even in long established liberal democracies like our own, inequalities persist. It’s fairly easy to understand that when many of the systems operating in a country were designed at a time when the only ones interacting with them were men that those systems will be built around male characteristics.

‘Equality’ in such circumstances doesn’t assuming everyone is identical, but realising how sex-based differences may have a disproportionate impact upon one demographic group compared to another. It’s a basic matter of fairness that we should aim to create a society in which the circumstances of ones birth and demographic characteristics do not prevent people from having the same life changes as everyone else.

One such example of this is pay. When comparing average male and average female pay in the UK, women’s pay is significantly lower, by way of comparison it’s the equivalent of working from the start of the year up to the 21st February for free compared to their male counterpart.

Now, people will point to any number of reasons why this might be the case, often falling back on the argument that it comes down to ‘choices’ women make over how they use their time, choosing to spend less of it working.

That may well be true, but it ignores the basic question of how far those are real choices. If a man wants to have a child, his biological role in the process of producing that child is typically a matter of moments rather than a matter of months of performance-limiting bodily changes. He really doesn’t have to choose between taking time out from work and having children, as evidenced by the fact that only 27% of fathers are currently choosing to use their paternity leave rights. For mothers that really isn’t an option.

Then there’s the disproportionate burden of care and domestic responsibilities women take on compared to men. Up to half of women in the UK provide 45 hours of unpaid care per week, by comparison just 25% of men provide up to 17 hours of unpaid care per week, when it comes do domestic labour women are continuing to undertake 60% more unpaid housework than men. So, when unpaid work is so unevenly distributed, is it really that women are opting-out of careers or is it simply that the inequalities around the balance between work-life balance mean that for women there simply aren’t enough hours in the day.

The system has been designed for men and in so doing women are always at a disadvantage. To fix this we need to change things. Some of that will mean continuing with changes around things like flexible working and paternity leave to create working environments which are easier to manage a family around and which enables both men and women to play a significant role in the early development of their children.

The more challenging bit is the ongoing culture shift, where those of us who are men recognise that our decisions outside of the workplace have a direct impact upon the broader position of women within society and that by playing an equal role in domestic and caring labour, we can help to build a world which is genuinely more equal for our partners and our kids.

DIVERSECrawley will be running a public event in County Mall today from 12pm to 2pm celebrating International Women’s Day.